Religious Violence

In May the murder in Vienna of Guru Sant Rama Nand, who was the leader of a Sikh offshoot movement called Dera Sach Khand, led to rioting in several northern Indian cities. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, himself a Sikh, said that he was “deeply distressed” by both the killing and the subsequent violence and stressed that “Sikhism preaches tolerance and harmony.”

In Nigeria, Mohammed Yusuf, leader of an Islamic group called Boko Haram, died in July while in police custody. The group had staged uprisings in northern Nigeria in an attempt to impose strict Islamic law throughout the country. Some 800 people were killed in the group’s attacks on police stations and other public buildings and in the response by security forces. In the aftermath of this violence, the governors of 19 northern states set up a committee to regulate the activities of Muslim and Christian clergy.

Archbishop Williams spoke out in August against the persecution of Christians in Pakistan after eight Christians were burned alive as homes were set on fire in clashes with Muslims. The violence had been touched off by reports that a Christian had desecrated the Qurʾan. The Anglican leader stated that Pakistan’s Christians were “disproportionately affected by the draconian laws against blasphemy,” which he said had been abused to settle personal grievances. Several weeks later the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches charged that the Pakistani laws had become “a major source of victimization and persecution” of religious minorities. In a statement in August, Yale University Press reported that it had decided to remove cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book about how the cartoons had led to violent protests in 2005; experts had warned that their publication in the book might set off new outbreaks of deadly violence.

Interfaith Relations

During a five-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land in May, Pope Benedict was criticized by several Israeli newspapers for not referring to his native Germany during a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Later, at a stop at Bethlehem in the West Bank, he expressed “solidarity” with Palestinians, who, he said, “long to be able to return to their birthplace or live permanently in a homeland of their own.” In late August the Rev. Samuel Kobia, outgoing general secretary of the World Council of Churches, told its Central Committee meeting in Geneva that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories was “a sin against God.” Later, the committee called on Israel and Palestine to “distinguish between the legitimate interests of the state of Israel and its illegal settlements.”

The Tony Blair Faith Foundation joined with the U.K.’s Department for International Development and the charities Islamic Relief, Oxfam, and World Vision to sponsor a series of seminars exploring the role of religion in development work. Blair, a former prime minister of Britain, told the first gathering in September that “people who hold deep convictions about life and its purpose necessarily can be prone to holding those views to excess or the point of prejudice.”

Church-State Relations

In April the Vatican denounced the arrests in China of several Roman Catholic leaders, including Bishop Giulio Jia Zhiguo of Zhengding, and said that such actions created obstacles to dialogue. In May Afghan government leaders dumped more than 1,000 books from Iran into a river because their contents were allegedly offensive to the country’s Sunni Muslim majority. Deputy Culture Minister Aleem Tanwir stated that a commission in Kabul had found that some of the books were “dangerous to the unity of Afghanistan” because they contained incorrect statements about the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. In September Vietnamese authorities removed followers of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk who had helped popularize Buddhism in the West, from the Bat Nha monastery in Lam Dong province. The ousted monks and nuns charged that they were removed because Nhat Hanh had called for an end to government control of religion. Government officials, however, characterized the conflict as a dispute between two Buddhist factions, contending that the action was taken because the abbot of the monastery wanted the Nhat Hanh group to leave. The French branch of the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud and fined the equivalent of nearly $900,000 by a Paris court in October. Six members of the group, which claimed to have 45,000 adherents in France, were also convicted of fraud, but the judges said that no jail sentences were imposed because the church had taken steps to change some practices. Earlier that month the European Court of Human Rights had ruled that Russia’s ban on the Church of Scientology was illegal. The court touched off a larger controversy in November when it ruled that crucifixes should be removed from classrooms in Italy because their display could be disturbing for non-Christian pupils and was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights. The ruling was denounced by the Vatican, Italian politicians, and bishops’ conferences in several countries. In a November referendum Swiss voters approved a constitutional ban on the construction of new minarets. The Swiss People’s Party, which sponsored the vote, had warned that Muslim political power could transform the country into an Islamic nation, although Muslims composed only about 4% of the country’s population.

In December the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that nearly 70% of the world’s people lived in countries with severe restrictions on religion. It ranked Saudi Arabia as the most restrictive country and the Middle East and North Africa as the most restrictive regions.

Click anywhere inside the article to add text or insert superscripts, subscripts, and special characters.
You can also highlight a section and use the tools in this bar to modify existing content:

Add links to related Britannica articles!
You can double-click any word or highlight a word or phrase in the text below and then select an article from the search box.
Or, simply highlight a word or phrase in the article, then enter the article name or term you'd like to link to in the search box below, and select from the list of results.

Note: we do not allow links to external resources in editor.
Please click the Web sites link for this article to add citations for
external Web sites.